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Influences: Book Award Winners in Their Own Words

We asked the winners of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Awards, which were presented Thursday night, what book or writer had the most profound influence on their work. Here are some of their responses:

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Photographs by Andrew White for The New York Times

Paul Beatty

Winner of the fiction prize for “The Sellout,” a scorching satire that wrenches humor out of painful subjects like slavery, police violence and segregation.

If I have to cite someone, it’d be Richard Pryor. He’s no author (unless you count “Blazing Saddles”), yet his willingness to be vulnerable and describe his world unapologetically, while simultaneously apologizing for everyone in it — including himself — has really stayed with me. More than anyone else, his is the voice I hear on the most consistent basis. With Bugs Bunny, friends and family, Toshiro Mifune, Billie Holiday, Bruce Lee and a select group of teachers right behind him.

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Sam Quinones

Winner of the nonfiction prize for his book “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic,” a deeply reported account of the devastation that opiate and pain pill addiction has caused in small towns and suburbs across America.

“Killings” by Calvin Trillin is one of the best books of narrative nonfiction in English. I’ve read it several times, including three times early in my career while I was a reporter covering crime in the city of Stockton, Calif., in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the crack years. The tales in it amount to magnificent, engrossing storytelling and gave me something to aspire to. “Killings” showed me how to structure a story, how to look for the story not in the gore of how people died but in the revelatory details of how they lived. Above all, it taught me to look for the larger stories about a place, a time, behind an individual’s personal tale.

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Maggie Nelson

Winner of the prize for criticism for “The Argonauts,” a memoir about gender, identity and sexuality, which describes her pregnancy and her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge.

Many books — most of which are discussed within the book’s pages — influenced “The Argonauts,” but probably “Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes” led the way. It gave me both the title and also provided the following ethos, which became a structural as well as tonal principle: “In what he writes, there are two texts. Text I is reactive, moved by indignations, fears, unspoken rejoinders, minor paranoias, defenses, scenes. Text II is active, moved by pleasure.”

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Margo Jefferson

Winner of the autobiography prize for “Negroland,” her memoir about growing up in an upper-class African-American family in Chicago, her struggles with depression, and her political awakening in college.

Maybe because I’ve been a critic for so long, I like to collect influences from lots of sources. I needed writers who mixed genres and tones, history and confession, ambivalence and authority. I’d read Woolf, Baldwin and Richard Rodriguez for years. They helped. So did Elizabeth Bishop’s essay “The Country Mouse” and Adrienne Kennedy’s memoir “People Who Led to My Plays.”

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Charlotte Gordon

Winner of the biography prize for “Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley,” which explores the links between the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley.

Whenever I feel reluctant to speak my mind, I think of Mary Wollstonecraft. She was called “a whore” and “a hyena in petticoats” for writing “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” So I think if she could stand it, I can, too, and I gird my loins and take a stand. One of my students even gave me a mug that says, “What would Mary do?” For two decades, I have been inspired by her bravery, how she continued to write and speak out against the sufferings of ordinary women, although she was condemned for being an “unnatural” woman, a monster. Despite all the attacks she faced, she never stopped bearing witness to the injustices endured by ordinary women in the 18th century. And somehow she also managed to live a passionate and tumultuous life – had many astonishing love affairs and then gave birth to the genius, Mary Shelley, author of “Frankenstein”!